Building Inside a Building

When Boeing, the world’s largest plane manufacturer, started designing a new version of its top-selling aircraft, the company wanted to put the plane’s designers as close as possible to the manufacturing process. At the airplane maker’s sprawling Renton, Washington, campus, office workers often face as much as a 20-minute walk from their desk to the factory floor, making meetings between the people designing the aircraft and those building the aircraft dreadfully inefficient and time-consuming. Facing pressure to churn out more planes to meet demand, the company decided to put its design engineers closer to the action—in a new office building built directly inside the factory.